Certify To Save Employees Time While Reducing Overall Expense Management Costs by 50%

Case Study - VitaPlus

Case Study | 2013

Company: VitaPlus

Industry: Agricultural Food Manufacturer

Client Since: 2010

Company Size: 375 employees

We are so thrilled that we found an expense management solution that meets our needs but is also easy to use for all of our employees. Certify is saving our accounting department so much time and our employees are getting paid much faster today.

Deb MessingerControllerVitaPlus

Certify To Save Employees Time While Reducing Overall Expense Management Costs by 50%

Company Overview

VitaPlus, based in Madison, Wisconsin, is an employee-owned company providing livestock feed and related services to livestock producers since 1948. The company holds the American Feed Industry Association's Safe Feed / Safe Food third-party certification at all of its facilities. The company has 375 employees and a dealer network across the Upper Midwest.

Expense Management Challenges

VitaPlus processes around 250 expense reports monthly, largely from gas mileage and meals for its salespeople and delivery drivers. The company had been using Excel for many years to handle expense reporting, a tedious process which required a lot of double checking, according to the company controller, Deb Messinger. In 2004, VitaPlus adopted a web-based system but it ended up being too complex and large for its needs after the vendor issued an upgrade in 2010. Finally, Messinger reviewed Certify, and decided to switch to the cloud-based expense management system because it offered rapid deployment, required no training, and integrated with the company’s mileage reporting system, Runzheimer.

Benefits from Certify

VitaPlus began to use Certify in 2010, realizing cost benefits immediately, since the system is 50% cheaper than the previous system. Certify is also significantly easier to use than the old system. “Employees can figure it out on their own and that includes everyone from accountants to our truck drivers.”

Faster reimbursement

Because it takes less time for people to create reports using Certify, they are getting paid up to two weeks faster. It’s also simpler for accountants to process the ACH reimbursements, by exporting data from Certify into an Excel file. “We can gather reports in minutes to do the ACH and then upload that data into our GL,” Messinger explains. Even though direct integration was an option, VitaPlus prefers the Excel process so that accounting can tweak journal entries based on unique departmental needs.

Better compliance

VitaPlus now uses Certify to enforce its weekly expense reporting deadline, and as a result, there are far fewer employees who don’t file their reports on time. This helps the company stay in compliance with its own AP policies. As well, the company has taken advantage of the corporate credit card integration feature in Certify, which eliminates the need for Accounting to match expenses with credit card charges or to reenter any data into the GL. Corporate card integration is saving VitaPlus about four hours weekly in Accounting staff time.

Convenient mobility

Many of the company’s salespeople use the Certify Mobile app on their smartphones to image and scan receipts into their Certify Wallet. The Certify receipt parsing and auto fill technology automatically enters all the details about individual charges into the employee’s report. “Everyone who uses it loves the mobile app because it is such a big time-saver,” Messinger remarks.

To download a copy of the client case study with VitaPlus,"Certify To Save Employees Time While Reducing Overall Expense Management Costs by 50%", click here.